I was invited to Norton Blogger Session for the launch of Norton 360 Version 5.0, thanks to Text 100.

Here are some highlights of Norton 360 Version 5.0:

• 100% Protection score for online threat detection from Dennis Technology Labs
• Ranked number 1 in performance testing by PassMark Software
• New Norton Control Center that provides quick access to Norton Cybercrime Index, Norton Online Family and Norton Safe Web
• Norton Safe Web now features Norton Secured badge that identify businesses with VeriSign SSL Certifications or VeriSign Trust Seal on their websites
• Performance improvement to PC Tuneup and Automated Backup

The Norton Cybercrime Index is something that is pretty interesting. It is exactly like a stock index that rises and fall each day depending on the number of threats the previous day have. These stats are collected anonymously from Norton users (about 55 million of them). No idea whether it is useful for the normal consumers though.

The PC Tuneup is something that interests me. It has a registry scanner that scans all applications that are automatically started when you boot into windows and tells you what is it, how many people are using it and what is the resource usage. I use CCleaner to delete my startup registry entries but I have to manually Google for what the .exe file is being used for just in case I deleted the wrong entry.

The PC Tuneup also automatically defrags your computer after it detects your computer has been idle for X amount of time which saves you the hassle of defragging your computer once every month.

Not really impress with the Automated Backup that comes with it as Windows 7 can do it for you as well if you need to backup to another HDD. Despite having 2GB or 25GB of online space to store your backup data in Norton’s cloud, the speed is questionable. There are many cheaper alternatives like Dropbox or Amazon S3. Currently Norton is charging USD$49.99 for 25GB per year for their Online Backup which is almost the same as Dropbox (not including the referral program) but more expensive than Amazon S3.

Prices as follows from Symantec Store (Singapore) and comes with 1 year subscription:

• Norton 360 Version 5.0 Standard Edition (1x PC License) – SGD$65
• Norton 360 Version 5.0 Standard Edition (3x PC License) – SGD$129
• Norton 360 Version 5.0 Premium Edition (3x PC License) – SGD$149

The difference between Standard Edition and Premium Edition is that the later comes with 25GB of online storage space to store your PC backup while the Standard Edition only comes with 2GB.

Was invited to the Cybercrime Uncovered event by Symantec at Pan Pacific Hotel. I managed to reach there on time as it is near my work place, surprise to see Wilfrid there as well, been quite some time since I saw it and he has change his phone to Nokia N97!

Sorry man, I have forgotten to bring my camera and my iPhone 3GS is not up for the job due to the lack of optical zoom. I shall wait for Wilfrid for his photos.

I was very impressed with the presentation, the whole of introduction part of how Symantec was borned and the evolution of threats and how Symantec solved the issue were in a single Flash file instead of powerpoint slides. The animation was very smooth and the graphics were very nice and not some images from Google. Even the presentation was done by 2 person and each of them will take turn to speak a sentence and that makes it sounds very lively. This is the best visual presentation I have seen. I can judge from the graphics to the animation of the flash, lots of work and effort had been spent on it.

They also show us some of the internal tools that they used to track worms/viruses as well as some QA tools to check the memory usage and the installation time of every internal build of the Norton 2010 products. Those internal tools are web based and done in flash as well. Impressed x2.

Norton AntiVirus 2010 Beta and Norton Internet Security 2010 Beta have been released and the main feature of these Norton 2010 products is codename “Quorum”. It is a reputation-based threat detection that identifies good/trusted applications of known origins with known publishers and other common attributes and allow them to be installed onto your PC. At the same time, it detects bad/harmful applications which have typically never been seen before, have an unknown publisher or hold other shady attributes and prevent them from installing onto your PC.

These reputations are gathered from Symantec’s users all around the world in an opt-in program. When you have downloaded the application from the Internet, let say, Firefox Setup 3.5.exe, and execute it, Symantec will query the reputation of the application and various attributes like how many people have installed this application, when the application first appeared as well as whether it is trustable from the cloud. In return, Symantec will inform the user whether to go ahead and install the downloaded application or delete the application from the PC. Pretty neat.

The final version of Norton 2010 products should be out somewhere in October 2009, do keep a lookout for it.

*UPDATE* Check out Wilfrid’s blog post on the event as well.